Bombing probe: Russian police find explosives

ST PETERSBURG: Russian authorities raided a residential building in St Petersburg on Thursday and found explosives similar to those used by a suicide bomber who this week blew up a metro carriage killing 14 people, two security sources said.

The discovery of the explosives raises the possibility that a string of bomb attacks was being planned in the city involving a group of plotters.

The explosives were discovered when security officials raided an apartment building in the city. They detained several people, according to a neighbour who saw the detentions taking place.

Russian investigators said they had detained several suspected accomplices of Akbarzhon Jalilov, born in Kyrgyzstan, who is the suspected bomber in Monday’s metro blast.

It was not immediately clear if the suspected accomplices were the same people detained at the apartment building. Security officials searching the apartment complex where the men were detained also found an explosive device there. Bomb disposal experts made the device safe after evacuating people living in apartments on two stairwells.

“We were told: The house is mined, get out quickly,” one woman, who only gave her name as Tatiana and lives in the building, said.

Another resident, who gave his name only as Anatoly, said he had seen police detain four young men occupying an eighth floor apartment next to his own. Vasily, another neighbour, said that “many people” had lived in the apartment and the detainees looked to be around 30.

The two security sources said that the explosives discovered at the building, in the east of the city, bore similarities to a bomb which was found on Monday inside a fire extinguisher at St Petersburg’s Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station.

That bomb did not detonate. State investigators said they believed the device had been left at Ploshchad Vosstaniya by Jalilov before he went on to another part of the subway network and detonated another bomb he was carrying.

One of the security sources said the explosives found in the apartment building on Thursday “was exactly like” the unexploded bomb found at the metro station. A second security source said that the quantities of explosives at the apartment and in the unexploded bomb were similar. Russian is still reeling after the Monday attack which took place on the day Russian President Vladimir Putin was visiting St Petersburg.